Thoughts for Eastertide

 He is risen!

 

In each of the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ the events of a single week occupy a sizeable portion of the text.  This is the week which began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah, and thus publicly announcing Himself to the nation as the long-awaited Messiah.  This is the week which ended on the Sabbath in which in the visible world His body lay in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid it while in the invisible world He in spirit had entered the other Kingdom of Death not as those who had gone there previously, a captive, but as a Conqueror. (1)  In this week, the week of Creation is recalled and fulfilled.  On the day corresponding to that in which God said “let there be light”, Christ, the Light of the World, announced Himself publicly.  On the day corresponding to that in which God made man in His Own image and so finished His work of Creation which He pronounced good, Jesus Christ just before dying proclaimed the word τετέλεσται (Jn. 19:30) which means “It is finished.”  The work He thereby proclaimed finished was the work of redemption, the work of propitiation, the work of Atonement, the work made necessary by man’s fall into sin.  Then on the day corresponding to that in which God rested from His work of Creation, His body rested in that borrowed tomb.

 

Last week was Holy Week, the week in our liturgical Kalendar devoted to special remembrance of this week of Gospel events.  It began with Palm Sunday, in which palms are waved and hosannas shouted in commemoration of Christ’s Triumphal entry.

 

On Maundy Thursday we were reminded of the Last Supper where the Sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted, where the New Commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), so like those with which the Lord summarized the Law and yet so different at the same time, was given, and where the Lord Himself set the example of this by washing His disciples’ feet, an act ritually re-enacted on the day which takes its name from the Commandment. 

 

On Good Friday the Crucifixion itself was the focus.  In outward appearance, this was the opposite of the Triumph at the beginning of the week.  Instead of “Hosanna”, the crowd cried “crucify Him”, instead of riding into the city He had to carry His cross out of it.  Beneath the outward appearance, of course, this was His true moment of Triumph.  He had told His disciples from the moment St. Peter had confessed “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) at Caesarea Philippi that this would come, that it was for this purpose that He entered into the world, that this is what it truly meant for Him to be the Christ.  He had not come to bring political deliverance to the Old Testament nation, but to bring deliverance from the slavery into which the Fall of Adam had delivered all mankind, slavery to sin and death, and He could only do this by suffering and dying Himself.  Since St. Anselm, we in the West have tended to think of this primarily in terms of the payment of a debt.  Man owed a debt but had no resources to pay, God had the resources but could not pay the debt qua God, so He became Incarnate as a Man and the God-Man paid the debt on behalf of the world.  In the East, they tend to think of it more in terms of a hostage situation in which Death, man’s enemy, has held him captive and Christ, Who is stronger than Death and over whom Death has not even the usurped claim due to sin, allowing Himself to be taken by Death so that He could destroy Death from the inside and set the captives free.  Both ways of thinking about it are taken from Scripture.  Ultimately, Charles Wesley spoke for Christians East and West when he put it “Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou my God should die for me!”

 

Holy Saturday commemorates both the resting of His body in the Grave and His Descent (as Conqueror) into Hell.  Traditionally, the second of these themes received more emphasis in the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  That this is not the case today (2) is in part due to unfortunate liturgical revisionism that has been influenced by the even more unfortunate theological revisionism which is squeamish about anything having to do with Hell. (3)  The other part is that often the only service on Holy Saturday is the evening vigil which begins with the Holy Saturday themes but moves into the theme of the Resurrection.  The evening of Holy Saturday is, by the reckoning of time established in the week of Creation (4), part of the following day.

 

That following day, of course, is the most important day of celebration in the Christian Kalendar.  In the English-speaking world we call it Easter, similar to how the Germans call it das Ostern.  Those silly and foolish individuals who come creeping out of the woodworks around this time each year to denounce the celebration as “pagan” get most of their mileage out of this name.   Even if, however, their questionable etymology of the word were to be proven correct, their argument is still nonsense because the thing itself, the feast day, was around long before this name got attached to it. 

 

The Hebrew word פסח (Pesach) is the name of the most important feast day of the Old Testament religion.  It is called Passover in English and it is the day on which the Israelites remembered their deliverance from slavery in Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. By the time of the New Testament the Israelites were speaking Aramaic more often than Hebrew and in Aramaic פסח took on a final aleph to become פסחא.  In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written and the primary language of the Church in the earliest centuries, this was transliterated into Πάσχα and at least as early as the second century this term was used for the Christian feast as well.  It retained this name in the North African/Western part of the Church where Latin superseded Greek as the primary language and in Latin it is spelled Pascha.  To this day, in the vast majority of languages the feast called Easter in English is called Pascha or some variation thereof and even in English we use the adjective “Paschal” to refer to things pertaining to Easter.

 

The history is clear.  The holiday did not begin as a pagan feast named Easter that was appropriated by the Church but as the Christian Passover.  This remains the essence of the feast regardless of what other names derived from the time of year in which it occurs became attached to it later in countries with Germanic languages.

 

Our silly and foolish friends if they are capable of pursuing their case any deeper than the superficial argument about the name may point out that the authorization for the Old Testament Passover, along with detailed instructions as to how to keep it, came directly from God, and ask where the similar authority for a Christian Passover is to be found.  The answer lies in what the New Testament teaches about the relationship between the events commemorated by the Old Testament Passover and those we commemorate in Holy Week leading up to Easter.

 

According to the New Testament, most especially the book of Hebrews, the Old Testament consists of types which prefigure or foreshadow the Gospel.  The blood sacrifices of the Levitical system were types of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world.   The earthly Tabernacle/Temple was a figure of the Heavenly Tabernacle made without human hands.  Other examples, not spelled out the way these were in Hebrews, are just as clear.  Moses, for example, the Law-Giver, was allowed to lead the Israelites up to the Promised Land but he was not allowed to lead them in, that role was given to Joshua (5) in which can be seen prefigured everything St. Paul had to say, which was a lot, about how the Law cannot make one righteous before God, only the grace brought by Jesus Christ can do that.

 

The Old Testament Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance from Egypt.  Israel had gone down into Egypt during the years of famine in which Joseph was the highest official in the land under Pharaoh whose favour he enjoyed.  They remained there four hundred years after which another Pharaoh, who feared rather than favoured the growing nation, had them enslaved.  Moses, Hebrew born but adopted into Pharaoh’s family, met God in the wilderness Who told him that He was sending him to Pharaoh to plead for Israel’s deliverance.  Multiple times Moses and his brother Aaron entered Pharaoh’s court with God’s demand that His people be set free, each time Pharaoh refused and a new plague fell upon Egypt.  In the final plague, the angel of death was sent to take the firstborn of every family in Egypt – only they, to whose door posts and lintels the blood of the Passover lamb had been applied, i.e., the Israelites, were spared.  Pharaoh then commanded Moses to take the Israelites and leave, only to change his mind again once they were gone and pursue them with his army to the Red Sea.  God opened a pathway for the Israelites through the Red Sea, then brought the waters down on the Egyptian army.

 

This entire event forged Old Testament Israel’s identity as a nation.  It also prefigured another, greater, deliverance.  The salvation of which the Exodus was but a type was not a deliverance from physical servitude but of spiritual servitude to sin.  Nor was it merely the deliverance of a nation but of the entire world.  This is the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ on the Cross which event took place on the Old Testament Passover.

 

Since that of which the Old Testament redemption of Israel was a shadow has come to pass, we who believe in Jesus Christ look back to that rather than to the shadow.  That there would be an annual Christian Passover celebrating Christ’s redemption of mankind was settled very early in the Church.  When it is first mentioned as such in the writings of the second century, it is treated as having been long established.  This would imply that it is Apostolic in origin and, indeed, the Apostles were barely in their grave before a dispute arose not over whether there should be a Christian Passover but over when it should be held. (6) Those who held the Quartodeciman position argued that the Christian Passover should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover (the fourteenth of Aviv/Nisan on the Hebrew calendar), others held that it should fall on the Sunday after.  Although the sides in the controversy tended to fall along regional and ethnic lines, there is clearly an underlying theological issue here of whether the Crucifixion or the Resurrection takes precedence.  The first ecumenical council of the Church, which met at Nicaea in 325 to address the heresy of Arianism, also ruled on this matter.  Ruling against the Quartodecimans the council determined that the Christian Passover would be held on the Sunday that follows the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. (7) 

 

The ruling of Nicaea I made it clear that the Christian Passover would be a commemoration of the Resurrection rather than of the Crucifixion although by this time Holy Week was starting to take shape with Good Friday being already firmly established. (8)   In this, can be seen a parallel to the decision made by the Apostles that the Church would meet on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath (Saturday).  That this decision was made, we know from the New Testament in which the Church is depicted as meeting on Sunday (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2). Although neither the decision itself nor the occasion for it are recorded, the reason why Sunday as opposed to say Monday or Wednesday, was selected is quite obvious.  The Sunday after Christ was crucified on the Old Testament Passover, the women among His disciples went to the tomb to complete the burial which had been done in haste due to the onset of the Sabbath.  They found the stone that sealed the tomb rolled away, the grave clothes in which He had been buried folded up and empty, and an angel there to tell them that He was not there, He was risen.

 

The importance of Christ’s Resurrection cannot be overstated.  St. Paul explains it exquisitely in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians.   Against those who took the Sadducees’ position that there will be no Final Resurrection, He argued that if the dead do not rise then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen we are without hope, but that since Christ is risen, then we know that the dead will all rise.  We are all dead in the first Adam because the sin by which he brought death into the world passed from him to all of us bringing death along with it.  Christ underwent death for us that He might remove the sting of death which is sin.  His victory over this final enemy is our victory, in Him, the last Adam, we are made alive.  His Resurrection was the firstfruits of the Resurrection in which we one day will all fully share even as we are to participate in it even now by walking in newness of life by faith.  His Resurrection, while in the same body in which He had died – He displayed the scars in His hands and side to His disciples – was not to the same life that He had left behind in dying, but to a new and higher kind of life which death can never touch.

 

In this we have a clue as to why the day of the week on which Christ rose was so important to the early Church that they set it both as their weekly day of corporate worship and the annual Christian Passover.  In the New Testament it is called the “first day” with reference to the week that follows.  The early Christians, however, also called it the “eighth day” in reference to the week which preceded it.  The week signifies the week of Creation, and, as we have seen above, this was especially true of the week of Jesus’ life and ministry on which the Gospels concentrate, the week we remember in Holy Week. What then does the eighth day that follows the seven which signify the Old Creation signify?

 

One early Christian writer described it as “a beginning of another world” (9).  St. Augustine argued that the Sabbath day of rest of the Decalogue was but a figure of the eternal rest to which the eighth day, revealed to the Christians in the Gospel, looks forward. (10)  The eighth day, then, is the day which comes after the seven of the Old Creation, the day of the New Creation, the life of which Jesus entered in His Resurrection, and in which we can share even before our own resurrection on the Last Day because we participate in His life as members of His mystical body, the Church.

 

How appropriate and how utterly unpagan is that annual Lord’s Day of Lord’s days, the Christian Passover of Easter in which after the reflection on our sin and mortality in Lent, culminating in our remembrance of the week which led from the Triumphal entry to Golgotha and the tomb, on the eighth day we joyously proclaim He is risen!

He is risen indeed.

 

Alleluia!

 

 (1)   The two Kingdoms of Death are the Grave in the collective sense, the place where the body is placed, and Sheol/Hades/Hell, where the spirits of the dead go.  When Jesus died on the Cross, His divine nature remained united to both His body in the Grave and His human spirit in Hades.  Jesus’s death, like any other human death, separated His human body from His human soul.  It could not separate either from His deity.  The Hypostatic Union in which the Eternal Son of God received a full and flawless human nature into His Eternal Person in the womb of the Virgin Mary the moment she said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38) can never be broken.

(2)   In the West.  In the East, the Descent into Hell is still very much the focus of the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  Due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, of course, the Eastern Holy Saturday and the Western Holy Saturday do not fall on the same day.

(3)   The Hell in the Descent into Hell, is the Hell referenced in note 1, vide supra, and not Gehenna, the place to which those who render themselves incurably wicked by rejecting Jesus Christ will be condemned at the Last Judgement.  That Christ did indeed descend there as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is Scriptural despite the claim of certain evangelicals to the contrary.  St. Peter, in his sermon on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost), quoted Psalm 16:10 and applied it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:25-31).  If the Resurrection fulfils “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell”, then Hell, again Sheol/Hades, is clearly where it was prior to the Resurrection.  There is no conflict here with Christ’s words to the dying thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).  Paradise is wherever Jesus Christ is.  On the original Holy Saturday, Hell itself was Paradise.

(4)   “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5)  It is because of this pattern in the Creation account that days in the sacred Kalendar of Christianity are counted sunset to sunset, as they are in the corresponding sacred calendars of Judaism and Islam, regardless of how days in the civil calendar are counted (midnight to midnight).  In the Bible itself, this is the one of three ways of counting days, and certainly the primary way in the Old Testament.  The other two are to count from sunrise to sunrise (morning/evening rather than evening/morning) and to count from midnight (only St. John does the latter, which is why the hours during the Crucifixion account in his Gospel differ from those in the Synoptics, which count from sunrise).

(5)   Joshua is the English spelling of a Hebrew name which, taken from Hebrew into Aramaic then Greek, becomes the name of which Jesus is the English spelling.

(6)   According to Eusebius the controversy broke out as early as the time of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in what is now Turkey and personal disciple of St. John the Apostle who was martyred around the middle of the second century.

(7)   This calculation formula translates the date of Passover in the Hebrew lunar calendar (Aviv/Nisan is the month of spring, the fourteenth is the Ides or full moon of the month) into an approximation in the solar calendar.

(8)   The commemoration of the Crucifixion on the Friday prior to Pascha/Easter is referenced as early as Tertullian.  The name “Good Friday”, of course, came much later. Note that this was no concession to the Quartodecimans.  The 14 of Aviv/Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, like the dates on the civil calendar, move across the week from year to year.  Commemorating the Crucifixion on the Friday before Easter, follows from commemorating the Resurrection on the day of the week on which it occurred.

(9)   The Epistle of Barnabas, 15.

(10)                       St. Augustine, Letter 55, 12-13.

Orthodox Christology and the Athanasian Symbol

 

The upcoming Sunday is Whitsunday which is the Christian Pentecost that looks back on the day the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles as they were waiting in the Upper Room following the Ascension.   It is the successor in the Christian Kalendar to Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks, the Jewish Pentecost, which is often thought of as looking back to the giving of the Law.   While it is not explicitly stated that this is the reason for the Festival in the Old Testament the timing is right.  Shavuot falls fifty days after the Jewish Passover, hence it's having been called Pentecost in the Greek-speaking ancient world.   Whitsunday falls fifty days after the Christian Passover, Easter, commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Forty days after the Resurrection came the Ascension and then ten days after the Ascension, fifty after the Resurrection, the Holy Ghost came upon the Apostles.

 

Whitsunday is one of the days appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Athanasian Creed to be recited instead of the Apostles’ Creed in Morning Prayer or Matins as is the Sunday after Whitsunday known as Trinity Sunday.  This rubric, along with the one that says that Morning and Evening Prayer should be available in every parish on a daily basis, are ones the Church ought to take more seriously.   It would be a great corrective to the doctrinal decay of the present day.

 

The Athanasian Creed, or more properly, since it is not in the form of a Credo, an “I believe” confession of faith but is rather in the form of a Quincunque Vult declaration of what must be believed by “whosoever will be saved”, the Athanasian Symbol is the longest of the three ancient Symbols.   Whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene-Creeds follow a Trinitarian structure – three sections, the first about the Father, the second and largest about the Son, and the third about the Holy Ghost and His earthly ministry through the Church – the Athanasian Symbol has two parts.   The first and longest is a thorough statement of the doctrine of the Trinity so as to exclude any possibility of confusing the Persons or dividing the substance.   The second part is a statement of the doctrine of Jesus Christ.   While the Christological section of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed which under ordinary circumstances is supposed to be used in a service of Holy Communion, adequately protects against Arianism, the main heresy against which the Church contended in the fourth century in which this Creed was developed, the Athanasian Symbol is a welcome supplement for it incorporates the safeguards of the doctrine of the Hypostatic (Personal) Union of Jesus Christ against Nestorianism and Monophysitism, the heresies against which the Church contended in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in the fifth century.   The Christological portion of the Athanasian Symbol begins like this:

 

For the right Faith is that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;

Perfect God, and Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.

Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ;

One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God;

One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.

For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one Christ.

 

The statement that He is “Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting” guards against the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea, the fourth century heretic who in his zeal to oppose Arianism taught that Jesus was less than fully human, that in Him the divine Logos took the place of a human νοῦς or mind.  Hence the reference to “a reasonable soul” as well as “human flesh.”   Jesus’ eternal divine nature did not take the place of anything missing in His human nature, He was perfect in both of His natures.   Therefore He had a human “reasonable soul”, that is a soul with a mind that reasons, that knows things by learning through experience and drawing deductive conclusions like any other human being, as well as His omniscient divine nature in which He knows everything because as God to be omniscient is not something different, added on, or accidental to His just being.  His human nature was complete, differing from ours only in that it was enhypostatic and sinless.   Enhypostatic means that His human nature did not belong to or comprise a self other than His divine Self, if this were otherwise, the Nestorians would have been right and He would have been two persons sharing the same body, instead of One Person, which would be something closer to the idea of possession than of Incarnation.   A self is not a component of human nature without which it would not be complete and completely human like a body or a human soul.   Of course a nature cannot exist without a self, but the self is the owner of the nature, that to which the nature belongs, and in the case of Jesus’ Christ’s complete human nature, the self to which it belonged was always the Self of the eternal Son of God.   Nor does His sinlessness indicate that He lacked something necessary to make Him human, quite the contrary.  Sin, although we talk about it as if it were a thing, something that has positive existence in us, something that was added to our nature at the Fall, because human language is such that if we didn’t talk about it this way it would be difficult to talk about it at all, is not actually a thing, with positive existence, added to our nature, but rather a deficiency, the hole where something we lost in the Fall used to be, something that exists in us only in a negative sense, as an absence or shadow.  Specifically it is the absence of the quality of rightness, of being right or just, in our thoughts, words, and actions, singular and habitual.   When we say that Jesus was sinless, we are saying that He lacked a lack, that the absence that is there in all of us of the rightness that ought to be there was itself absent in Him, meaning that the rightness that ought to be there in us was present in Him, and that therefore His lacking sin really means that He was completely human in a way that we in our fallen estate are not.

 

In the twentieth century, Gordon H. Clark and Cornelius Van Til, two of the conservative Presbyterian theologians who followed J. Gresham Machen in opposing the apostasy of the Presbyterian Church of America and Princeton Theological Seminary when these bodies abandoned the nineteenth century Presbyterian orthodoxy of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, had a famous controversy over the relationship between divine and human knowledge.  Van Til took the position that God’s knowledge was qualitatively different from man’s knowledge, Clark took the position that it was merely quantitatively different.  To explain further, suppose a truth, let us say that all dogs are animals.   Clark maintained that this truth as known by both God and man, is the same known truth to God as it is to man, except that God knows it more thoroughly, knows all of its details, knows every type of dog for example, everything implicit in it, and everything consequential to it.  The truth, however, is the same truth for man as it is for God, and the knowledge of it is the same knowledge.   The difference between man’s knowledge and God’s knowledge, to Clark, is that man’s knowledge is limited, that he knows certain finite truths and can add to his knowledge, truth by truth, but this can never approach God’s knowledge, because God knows all truths, and so His knowledge is infinite, which the finite can never approach because infinity is indivisible and so no amount of finites can ever add up to an infinite.   Van Til maintained that God’s knowledge differs from man’s in more than this, that it is qualitatively different in that each truth is different to God than it is to man, with God’s knowledge of it being the true knowledge, of which  man’s knowledge is only an approximate resemblance.   While each man’s most zealous adherents, such as Greg Bahnsen for Van Til and John W. Robbins for Gordon Clark, maintained the controversy long after its originators had passed, others less partisan have come to suspect that the two men were talking past each other.  Clark’s position is grounded in the idea that truth is truth and that it is the same for everybody, an idea that seems to have been jettisoned today, but without which the basic laws of logic – the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle - fall.   Van Til’s position is grounded in the idea that God is incomprehensible by man and that in speaking truth of Him, neither univocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark of the Rottweiler) nor equivocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark of the tree) language can convey truth but only analogical which is neither univocal or equivocal but shares aspects of both enough so that something meaningful and understandable can be conveyed through it about the infinite Being that is beyond the comprehension of human minds.  Clark and Van Til, being strict Calvinists, would have abhorred the thought, but both would have benefited from a thorough grounding in Thomistic theology and philosophy for both of their starting points were stressed and harmonized in the thinking of the Angelic Doctor.   Furthermore, they would have benefited from looking at the Patristic consensus on the difference between divine and human knowledge as formulated in the struggles of the orthodox Fathers against heresies such as Apollinarianism.   Divine knowledge is indeed different from human knowledge in more ways than the mere quantitative but the difference is between the omniscience of the simple, uncreated, Being Whose essence and every attribute are the same as His very existence and the finite knowledge of composite, created, beings who must attain and accumulate what they know, truth by truth, fact by fact, over time.

 

Other errors that have plagued Christianity in recent centuries could have been avoided by more attention to the Athanasian Symbol and the words “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.”   Take, for example, kenoticism.  This error takes its name from the Greek word rendered “made himself of no reputation” in Philippians 2:7 in the Authorized Bible.   The English Standard Version, which is the apostate liberal Revised Standard Version as modified for Crossway Publishers by a committee that included enough evangelical celebrities like J. I. Packer and Wayne Grudem as to persuade the gullible into thinking a liberal translation had thereby been turned into a conservative and faithful one, renders it “emptied himself” in the American edition as do the ASV, NASV, and NRSV.  The New Living Translation renders it “he gave up his divine privileges.”  The NIV has “made himself nothing” as does the UK edition of the ESV.   Now, “empty” is not a wrong translation of κενόω when it comes to word-to-word translation, it is the basic, literal, meaning of the word.   Contextually, however, in Phil. 2:7, the meaning is that of the Authorized Bible.  It is not that the Son of God underwent an ontological emptying in which He divested Himself of His deity, part of His deity, or even His “divine privileges.”   Think of the words of Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3:13 “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.”   He declared there that He was in heaven even as He was on earth speaking to Nicodemus having come down from heaven.   Clearly there was no ontological divesting of His deity or any of His divine attributes, which in orthodox theology are not accidental in God, but all belong to and indeed are equivalent to His very essence.   St. Paul in Philippians 2 was not talking about an ontological change in the Son of God but His humility in taking to Himself another nature, a far less exalted nature, a created nature, and undergoing all the experiences appropriate to that nature and indeed everything that human nature experiences as a result of its debasement through the Fall into sin even though the human nature He took unto Himself was not so debased.  Kenoticism is the interpretation of Phil. 2:7 as meaning that Jesus underwent an ontological emptying of at least part of His divinity in order to become truly man.  It is usually thought of as beginning with Erlangen School neo-Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius around the middle of the nineteenth century.  Another major proponent of it was Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, a liberal (in the sense of embracing the so-called higher criticism, rejecting Biblical infallibility, and trying to make the Christian faith conform to so-called scientific theories built upon the unsound foundation of anti-Christian naturalistic presuppositions) Anglo-Catholic (“liberal Anglo-Catholic” ought to be as absurd an expression as “liberal fundamentalist” since pre-Oxford Movement high churchmen were the most reactionary – as always I mean that as a positive compliment – wing of the Church, and the Oxford Movement began as a reaction against liberalism).   The sound orthodox doctrine, however, is that of the Athanasian Symbol.  The Incarnation was “not by conversion of the God head into flesh”, which is what an ontological kenosis would amount to, but “by taking of the Manhood into God.”   The divine nature, the Godhead, is simple and immutable.  It does not change.   Being infinite and simple, it is indivisible with no composite parts.  No attributes can be separated from it as accidental, each are the very essence of the Godhead.   The Son of God, the Second of the Three Persons Who each possess the whole of the one Godhead in the Trinity, took to His Self another nature, a complete human nature, so that from the moment of the Incarnation – His conception – He has subsisted in two modes simultaneously, as fully God and fully Man.

 

 

That Jesus Christ is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person” is a necessary corrective of two opposing errors in the main branches of continental Protestantism.   In the early days of the sixteenth century Reformation, Dr. Martin Luther accused the Swiss branch of the Reformation of Nestorianism.  This was because Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich who was the leading Swiss Reformer for most of the period in which Dr. Luther led the Reformation in Germany in defence of his memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper argued against the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament on the grounds that Jesus’ body, and His human nature in general, has a local presence which is currently in Heaven, preventing it from being on the altars of all the parishes in Christendom.   Dr. Luther was a strong defender of the Real Presence, the strongest among the Protestant Reformers, and this issue was what prevented the success of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 which sought unity between the German and Swiss branches of the Reformation and at which both Luther and Zwingli were present.  Zwingli died two years after the failed Colloquy and five years after that French Reformer, John Calvin, published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion and was persuaded by William Farel to move to Geneva and lead the Reformation there.  Calvin, while he rejected Zwinglian memorialism, held to a spiritual view of the Real Presence rather than the more literal view of the Lutherans who concluded that the difference between his view and Zwingli’s was more nominal than substantial.  That Calvin in rejecting the Lutheran view borrowed Zwingli’s argument based on the local presence of the body of Christ lent its support to this conclusion.  Thus, Calvinism became as suspect in Lutheran eyes as Zwinglianism of, if not outright Nestorianism, a Nestorian tendency.

 

That this Nestorian tendency actually exists in the tradition of Reformed thought is undeniable today although it was not remotely as evident in the sixteenth century.  In our day, a leading “orthodox” Reformed theologian, the late R. C. Sproul, accused the hymn writer Charles Wesley of bordering on Patripassionism (the heresy against which Tertullian wrote his Against Praxeas, it would later be renamed after Sabellius, and is essentially the modalist view of the Trinity, that the Three Persons are not Three Persons but three names or offices of the same Person) for the line in his beloved hymn And Can It Be that says “that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”   Sproul’s accusation against Wesley, however, did not reveal actual Patripassionism on the part of the hymn writer, who by no means confused the Persons of the Trinity, but rather Nestorianism on the part of the one making the accusation.  It was the human nature of Jesus that died, Sproul argued, not His divine nature.   This is a fundamentally Nestorian argument.  Natures do not die.  Persons die.  Jesus, the Person Who is the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, died.  That means that when He died, God died.  He was able to die because in the Incarnation He took to Himself a second nature, human nature, which was mortal, that is to say, capable of death, as His divine nature, which is immortal, incapable of death, is not.   The death the Son of God experienced, therefore, was a human death, but it was the human death of a Person Who is fully God, which is why Wesley’s line is legitimate.   Since the human nature and divine nature of Jesus both belong to the same Person in which they are eternally united it is legitimate to predicate of that Person whatever is true of either nature even when speaking about Him in terms of the other nature.  This is called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties or attributes, a Scriptural example of which can be seen in the verse quoted earlier from Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus.  Note that He calls Himself “the Son of man” when stating that He is, that is in the present at the time when He was speaking to Nicodemus, in heaven.  Sproul’s Nestorianism was particularly troublesome in that it expressed itself as taking exception to something that is arguably the entire point of the Christian message – that in the Incarnation, and in the suffering and death the Son of God was able to experience because of the Incarnation, God entered into the plight of humanity and redeemed and sanctified it by His sharing in it, that God imposed no suffering upon mankind as a natural or juridical consequence of sin that He had not determined to go through Himself to redeem us.   It has been more common among the Reformed of the last century or so, to revive Nestorianism in its original form, the rejection of the honorific of “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary.  Nestorius rejected this honorific, or rather its Greek original Θεοτόκος (literally, God-bearer, but because τόκος refers to bearing in the specific sense of bearing children rather than the more general sense, it means Mother of God) and based his rejection on the fact that Jesus received His human nature from Mary rather than His divine.  The problem with his reasoning, a problem so serious that it was condemned as heresy in the Council of Ephesus, is that the Person to Whom the Blessed Virgin gave birth was One Person Who is both God and Man, and while He did not receive His deity from her, she is still the Mother of the Person Who as the Son of God is God, and therefore the Mother of God.  The Nestorian tendency in the Reformed tradition did not manifest itself in this form until recently because Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin et al. in the sixteenth century all had a higher, more Catholic, Mariology than their twentieth and twenty-first century successors.  Note that while the revival of the Nestorian rejection of this honorific has not been limited to the Reformed among Protestants of the last couple of centuries, the Reformed are the only ones among this renaissance of Nestorianism who claim to care about the Patristic orthodoxy of the early Ecumenical Councils.

 

Dr. Luther, therefore, was correct in perceiving a Nestorian tendency in the Reformed tradition.  Unfortunately, in responding to it he opened the door to a different sort of error.   In the fifth century, after Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, an opposite heresy called monophysitism developed among those who were most vehement in their rejection of Nestorianism.   Monophysitism, as the name suggests, is the idea that after the Incarnation, Jesus Christ was not just One Person, but had only one nature.   Those who adopted this position pointed to a line in the writings of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who had led the orthodox side at Ephesus, which they interpreted as saying that the Incarnate Christ had only one nature but this was a case of a term not having yet attained its settled meaning in theology.   Before the Council of Chalcedon issued its definition, clarifying the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of the two natures in the one Person of Jesus Christ, the word φύσις was not the settled word for “nature” but was used with other meanings, sometimes interchangeably with ὑπόστασις which was the settled (1) theological word for person in Greek. (2)  This seems to be how St. Cyril was using the term.   The monophysites, particularly the Eutychians who followed Eutychius of Constantinople, however, taught that in the Incarnation Jesus’ human nature was sort of absorbed into His divine nature    This is what was condemned as heresy at Chalcedon.  Dr. Luther did not revive the error of Eutychius.   He did, however, in response to Zwingli and Calvin, draw some unfortunate conclusions from the communicatio idiomatum.

 

Dr. Luther’s position is often misunderstood.   When he responded to the claim that Jesus’ body cannot be literally present in the Sacrament because it’s local presence is in Heaven by saying that since in Jesus the divine and human are inseparably united Jesus’ human nature is present everywhere His divine nature is, this was not his explanation of how Jesus is present in the Sacrament but his rebuttal of the argument that Zwingli and Calvin built upon the local presence of the body of Christ.   In other words, by maintaining that through its union with His deity Jesus’ human nature was in a sense omnipresent he was responding to the claim made based on the local presence of Jesus’ body in Heaven by saying that the local presence is not the only presence that Jesus’ human nature has, as is assumed by the Zwinglian and Calvinist position, rather than saying that it is through this particular other presence that Jesus is present in the Sacrament.  Many of Dr. Luther’s critics on this point do not get beyond their objections to his claim for a sort of omnipresence for Jesus’ human nature to see that what he meant by Jesus’ Sacramental Presence was a third kind of presence that was neither the local presence of Jesus’ body nor this omnipresence that he claimed was shared from Jesus’ deity to His humanity.   It is this claim of a shared omnipresence that concerns us here, however.

 

In the orthodox doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum the attributes of Jesus’ divine nature and those of His human nature are shared, not with the other nature directly, but with the Person Who is Subject and Owner of both natures.  Had Dr. Luther limited his talk of Jesus’ divine attributes being shared with his human attributes to His omnipresence his position, depending upon how he further explained it, would not necessarily contradict the orthodox viewpoint.   Indeed, it is logically necessary that if the divine and human natures have since the establishment of the Hypostatic Union in the Incarnation been inseparably united that wherever Jesus is both of His natures in some sense are which translates into Jesus’ human nature being in some sense omnipresent.   The question, however, is what is that some sense?  Obviously that sense is not that the local presence of His human body and soul have been extended infinitely.   While omnipresence as an attribute of the Godhead is not a local presence but a presence that transcends the limits of locality it would be wrong to say that this omnipresence now belongs to Jesus’ human nature qua His human nature.  That would require that either the omnipresence of His Godhead has passed from His divine nature to His human nature or that it has been duplicated in His human nature.  Divine attributes can neither be duplicated nor alienated from the divine essence.   The sense in which Jesus’ human nature can legitimately be said to be omnipresent is that because it is inseparably united with His divine nature it is present everywhere the divine nature is present in the divine nature.  Thus, the Lutherans are right in maintaining that what they call the Extra Calvinisticum, the idea that Jesus as God is present in places where He as Man is not present, is wrong, but they themselves are wrong in thinking that because everywhere Jesus is present He is present, since the Incarnation, as both God and Man, that His omnipresence has passed from the omnipresent nature to the locally present nature so that the locally present nature is now omnipresent in se, rather than that through the inseparable union of the two natures in the Person of Jesus Christ, both are present wherever that Person is present, in the nature that is omnipresent.  Unfortunately, the Lutheran misunderstanding of the communicatio idiomatum goes beyond this, for the Lutherans also claim that omnipotence and omniscience have become part of Jesus’ human nature as well as His divine nature.   That Jesus’ human nature must in some sense be omnipresent is a logical requirement of the Hypostatic Union because the doctrine forbids the separation of the two natures and if Jesus were somewhere present without His human nature there His divine nature would be separate from His human nature.   No such logical requirement can be deduced with regards to His omnipotence and omniscience.

 

Again, the Athanasian Symbol declares that Jesus is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person” and it is important to consider these words in the light of the preceding words “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.”   Sometimes the One Person of Jesus Christ is spoken of as if He were the product of the Incarnation as if His Person was what you get when you add His deity to His humanity.   This, however, would make Him a created and composite person.   His Person, His Self, His Ego is eternal.  He has always existed with the Father Who eternally begat Him and with the Holy Ghost Who eternally proceeds through Him from the Father.   In the Incarnation, without changing Who He eternally is, the Son of God, the Divine Logos, or What He is, Very God of Very God, of one substance with the Father, He united to His eternal Person a perfect, created, human nature so that the same eternal Person Who eternally existed as God, now and forevermore exists also as Man.

 

Given the number of basic Christological errors prevalent today we would do well to follow the liturgical use of the Athanasian Symbol as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer.

 (1)   I have used the word “settled” here where most writers would probably use the word “technical” because I do not like to speak of “technical terms” in theology, the word “technical” having connotations closely associated with Modern ways of thinking and doing things that I am very much opposed to importing into theology.

(2)   Before ὑπόστασις was settled on as the Greek equivalent of the Latin persona and these terms became settled as the Greek and Latin designations of what it is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost three, it had itself been used as a synonym for οὐσία, the Greek word for “being” or “essence” – in God, although in no created being, essence is identical to being or existence – which is the word that designates what it is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost one.  The original synonymy of ὑπόστασις and οὐσία can still be seen in the term used in Latin theological writings as the equivalent of οὐσία.   This is the word substantia, from which our English word substance that in older theological English was always used for these terms is derived.  If you break this word down into its component parts sub (under) and stantia (from stans, a participle form of sto, stare, meaning “to stand”) these correspond to the component parts of ὑπόστασις.  The point of bringing this up is to illustrate that it is important to pay attention, when the important terms of theology are used in the early centuries, to when they are used.  When they are used in conciliar definitions, at least the definitions of those councils received by the larger Church as truly ecumenical, as φύσις was at Chalcedon, they can be taken as from that point having their settled meaning.  This meaning should not be automatically assumed for earlier uses.  The term ὁμοούσιον was used in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century to indicate that the Son shared the same essence, substance, being with the Father.   Those who objected to the term at and immediately following the First Council of Nicaea were not all Arians who objected to the idea that it was being used to express.  Their concern was that a generation or so prior it had been used with a very different meaning, a Sabellian one, by, for example, Paul of Samosata.  While politics had as much or more to do with the time it took for the Nicene consensus against Arianism to be finalized in the Church it was only through this finalization that ὁμοούσιον attained its settled meaning and the danger of it being taken in a Sabellian sense passed.

And the Word Was Made Flesh

 

St. John is not the first of the Four Evangelists that we usually think of in association with Christmas.   It is St. Matthew and St. Luke who provide us with the narrative of our Lord’s nativity.   St. Luke tells of the census of Caesar Augustus that required Joseph and the Virgin Mary to journey to Bethlehem where they found no room in the inn and so had to lodge in the stable where the Lord Jesus was born.   St. Luke also tells us of the angelic choir who appeared to the shepherds and directed them to where they might find the newborn Messiah.   St. Matthew tells us of the visit of the wise men from the East bringing the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.   It is St. John, however, who plainly states the importance of these events:

 

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14)

 

This is a theological statement.   It, and the words which immediately follow after in which the Evangelist testifies to his and others (SS Peter and James at the Transfiguration) having beheld the glory of the Word, conclude the extended theological discourse about the Word that serves as a preamble to the fourth Gospel.

 

That the celebration of the birth of our Saviour is a time for deep theological reflection was evidently an opinion shared by the writers of the most familiar and loved of Christmas carols.   Think of these words from what Charles Wesley called his Hymn for Christmas Day later retitled Hark the Herald Angels Sing by George Whitefield:

 

Veil'd in Flesh the Godhead see,
Hail th' incarnate Deity!
Pleas'd as Man with Men t'appear,
Jesus our Emmanuel here.

 

Since the days of Wesley and Whitefield the last two lines have been further revised to “Pleased as Man with Men to dwell/Jesus our Emmanuel” but the import is the same and it is also the same as that of John 1:14 – God came down and took on human flesh and dwelt among us.

 

Or think of the second stanza of Adeste Fideles, known in English as O Come, All Ye Faithful, the composition of which is uncertain but which was first published to our knowledge by John Francis Wade in the eighteenth century (Frederick Oakeley was the translator for the English version):

 

Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine
Gestant puellæ viscera
Deum verum, genitum non factum.

 

Or in English:

 

God of God, light of light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb;
Very God, begotten, not created.

 

This is largely taken from the Nicene Creed.   It comes from the section of the Creed that addresses the Arian heresy that the Nicene Council was convened to deal with. (1)   These words were put in to make it absolutely clear that the Jesus in Whom the Church places her faith is God, co-equal and co-eternal, with the Father.   The middle line references the ancient hymn Te Deum Laudamus traditionally attributed to St. Ambrose of Milan.

 

Later in the carol we find this more direct reference to John 1:14:

 

Patris aeterni Verbum caro factum.

 

A literal translation would be “The Word of the Eternal Father made flesh”.   In the usual English version it is rendered:

 

Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.

 

This, the Incarnation, is the key theological truth of Christmas.   While the Gospel message is focused on the events of Good Friday and Easter, in which Jesus took our sins upon Himself, paid the penalty as our Redeemer, defeated the foes who had long held us captive – sin, the devil, death, hell – and rose triumphant over them from the grave, none of this would have been possible without the events of Christmas, without the Incarnation.   Just as the joy of the empty tomb and the encounters with the risen Lord could not have been had there not first been the sorrow and the suffering of the Cross, so there could have been neither Cross nor empty tomb, had there not first been that birth in the stable in Bethlehem.  The road to Calvary – and what came after – began at the manger.

 

There are some who like to tell us that “Logos” in John 1:14, and the entire Johannine preamble to which it belongs, should not have been translated “Word” in English.   The English word “Word”, they tell us, does not do justice to the Greek word.   While they are partly right in that the Greek word has a lot more meaning to unpack than is suggested by its English equivalent it is very wrong to say that any word other than “Word” could properly render Logos in the Gospel of St. John.   To render it otherwise, as Reason perhaps, or Logic, might bring out some of the philosophical implications of Logos, but would lose the significance that St. John himself attached to Logos in using it to identify Him Who became Incarnate and was born of the Virgin.   The very first words of the preamble “En archei” are an obvious allusion to the first words of Genesis – “in the beginning”.   After asserting of the Logos that He was with God and that He was God – two Persons, co-equal, co-eternal – , and repeating for emphasis that He was in the beginning with God, the very next thing St. John says of the Logos is “panta di’ autou egeneto kai choris auto egeneto oude hen ho gegonen”.  The Authorized Bible faithfully and accurately renders that as “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made”.   This too alludes to the first chapter of Genesis. 

 

The first verse of Genesis says “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”.   This introduces us explicitly to the Father, the God with Whom, the Logos/Word was in the beginning according to John 1:1.   God the Son, the Logos/Word through Whom all things were made is implicit in the verse.   The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, is introduced to us in the second verse “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”   Then in the third verse He Who was implicit in the first is brought out into the open and introduced to us explicitly “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light”.

 

These words “And God said” occur throughout the Creation account.   The sixth verse “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”   The ninth verse “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” The eleventh verse “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”   Verses fourteen to fifteen “ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.”   The twentieth verse “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”   The twenty fourth verse: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”   Finally the twenty-sixth verse “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

 

When St. John says of the Word, “all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made”, this summarizes the entire first chapter of Genesis.  God the Father created all things by speaking them into existence.   God the Son is the living Word thus spoken through Whom the Father created all things. This is Who St. John tells us “was made flesh and dwelt among us”.     So, as usual, the translators of the Authorized Bible got it right, and the preachers who like to think they are a lot smarter than they actually are have it wrong.   (2) Word, and only Word, is the right word for Logos in the English of John 1:1-14.

 

The All-Powerful Word of God, Who was with God the Father from the beginning, and sharing His divine essence is Himself God, became flesh and dwelt among us.   He was, as He Himself told Nicodemus in John 3:16, God’s gift to us – the first Christmas gift.

The response that this calls for from us is that of the refrain of Adeste Fideles:

 

O come, let us adore Him

O come, let us adore Him

O come, let us adore Him

Christ the Lord.

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

 

 (1)   Speaking of the Nicene Council, the sixth century Church historian Theodorus Lector in his Historia Tripartita lists the Right Reverend Nicholas, Bishop of Myra as having been in attendance.   Yes, that is the Saint Nicholas.  According to later legends, he slapped either Arius himself or one of the heresiarch’s followers in the face at the Council.

(2)   Preachers who think they are a lot smarter than they actually are tend to come out of the woodworks at this time of the year.   There are those who like to tell us that Jesus couldn’t have been born in December and that the Church borrowed a pagan holiday when she made December 25^th Christmas.   Hippolytus of Rome, who died almost a century prior to the first Council of Nicaea wrote that Jesus was born eight days before the kalends of January, and a December birth is the implication of the account of the angel’s visit to Zechariah in St. Luke’s Gospel.  Zechariah was of the division of Abijah that served in the Temple during the week of Yom Kippur in September/October.  The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, therefore, would have been March/April, when the conception of Jesus took place, making His birth in December/January.   Then there are those who claim Jeremiah 10 forbids Christmas trees.   These might have a point if anyone burned incense to a Christmas tree, offered it a sacrifice, or prayed to it, but as this is not what is typically done with Christmas trees, which are decorations not idols, these preachers merely prove themselves to be Pharisaical clowns of the worst sort.

Christmas Customs and Hyper-Protestant Killjoys

 

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.  – Phil. 4:4

 

In an earlier essay I debunked the neo-Cromwellian, hyper-Protestant claim that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday and demonstrated that it is of Christian origin.   It is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, which early Church Fathers had calculated to have fallen on the twenty-fifth of December at least a century before the events – the legalization of Christianity, the conversion of Constantine the Great, the making Christianity the official religion of Rome – that the hyper-Protestants believe initiated the syncretism that in their view corrupted Christianity with paganism, and, indeed, before there was even any pagan significance to the date of the twenty-fifth of December.   I also demonstrated that the information that St. Luke provides us about the timing of the birth of Christ in his Gospel – the Annunciation took place in the sixth month of St. Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist, which pregnancy began shortly after St. Zechariah was visited by Gabriel in the Temple, which most likely occurred during the week of Yom Kippur if not the exact day – supports the placing of Christ’s birth in December-January.    The exact process by which the Church Fathers calculated more specific dates is not clear, although the date of the Annunciation seems to have been calculated first and some theorize that it had to do with the idea that Christ was conceived on the same day He died.   That the Church Fathers were looking for dates when the Jewish holy days that the events in St. Luke’s chronology fell on or around – Passover for the Annunciation, Hanukkah for the Nativity – matched up with the events on the solar calendar that they approximate (the spring equinox and winter solstice) is perhaps a likelier explanation than the influence of the Jewish concept of “integral age”.   The twenty-fifth of March and December would not line up with the precise date of the solar events by our calculations today, but these were calculated differently back then.   Looking for such convergence does not indicate a pagan influence.   That the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the firmament for “signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” by God Himself is asserted in the first chapter of the Bible (Gen. 1:14).

 

Having debunked the hyper-Protestant claims about the date of Christmas, let us turn to their claims about the manner in which it is celebrated.   In one sense they seem to be on firmer ground here.  Every place in which Christmas is celebrated has its local customs as to how it is celebrated and many of these seem to have been adopted from traditions that were around before the area was evangelized.   Nevertheless, this hardly makes Christmas “pagan”.  

 

The sort of things we are talking about here are the accidents of Christmas, not its essence.   What makes Christmas Christmas, is not the goose or turkey and pudding, the gift-giving, the holly and mistletoe, the stockings and Yule log, the wreathes and wassail, or any such thing.   It is the Christmas story, which comes directly from Sacred Writ, the early chapters of the Gospels of both SS Matthew and Luke.   Many of the most beloved of Christmas carols either retell the Christmas story in verse or proclaim the theological significance of the events narrated in the story or both.   I am not talking about “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman”, obviously, but carols like Charles Wesley and George Whitefield’s “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, Dr. Martin Luther’s “Silent Night, Holy Night”, and “Adeste Fidelis” and its English translation “O Come All Ye Faithful”.    The very name of the holiday speaks of Christians celebrating the Nativity of Christ by participating in the Holy Sacrament.   Christmas is a contraction of “Christ’s mass”.   Hyper-Protestants will no doubt read every last bit of Romanist doctrine regarding transubstantiation into the word “mass” but this word, taken from the Latin words used to dismiss (another word that we get from the same Latin source) the congregation at the end of the service, simply means a liturgical service in which the Eucharist is celebrated.   Things are defined by their essence, not their accidents.   Christmas is defined by the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, not by the decorations, food, and merry-making.

 

That having been said, if our hyper-Protestant friends persist in objecting some of the food and drink, gifts and games, and decorations having had roots in pre-Christian traditions, then the manner in which these came to be incorporated into the celebration of Christmas needs to be pointed out to them.   This is because hyper-Protestantism is based upon the idea that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition that the hyper-Protestants object to, which is basically everything for which they cannot find an exact Scripture verse either authorizing or commanding it, is something that was imposed upon the unsuspecting Christian laity by an evil clergy out to rob them of their Christian liberty.   This is precisely the opposite of how elements from pre-Christian winter festivals became a part of Christmas celebrations.   It was the people who brought these sorts of things into Christmas, not the Church that imposed them upon the people.   If anything, the Church may have initially tried to dissuade the people from doing this, but tolerated and eventually accepted it on the grounds that these sort of things are not intrinsically pagan, are minor matters, and that what Scripture does not prohibit it permits (the hyper-Protestants operate on the reverse of this, John Calvin’s regulative principle, that what Scripture does not permit it prohibits, which is clearly far less compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty).  

 

One of the silliest examples of hyper-Protestant opposition to Christmas traditions with pre-Christian origins has to do with the Christmas tree.   A Christmas tree is an evergreen tree – spruce, pine or the like – that people set up in their homes, usually in the living room, and decorate with stars, angels, tinsel, candles or electric lights, and other ornaments, and under which they place the presents to be opened at Christmas.   It is a relatively recent addition to Christmas traditions and appears to be of Germanic origin.   Dr. Luther is known to have decorated Christmas trees with candles and some have attributed the start of the tradition to him, others trace it back to the pre-Christian Germanic traditions of Yule.   Either way, some hyper-Protestants maintain that it is explicitly condemned in the prophecy of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.    They are referring to a passage found at the beginning of the tenth chapter of Jeremiah - specifically the third and fourth verses.   Here are those verses:

 

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.   They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

 

Now, the hyper-Protestants who interpret these verses as referring to Christmas trees, might have a point if the people who put up Christmas trees erected altars in front of the Christmas trees, offered sacrifices to them and burned incense to them, prayed to them, trusted them to deliver them from their enemies, and did any of that sort of thing.   I don’t know of anyone who does this sort of thing with his Christmas tree, nor do I know of anyone who knows somebody else who does.    

 

The entire passage in which these verses are found – the first sixteen verses of the chapter, make it abundantly clear that what is being talked about is not a custom of erecting a tree and decorating it for festive purposes, but the making of an idol.    Consider the verse that immediately follows the ones quoted above:

 

They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go.   Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.  

 

When Jeremiah talks about how they “are upright as the palm tree, but speak not” this very similar to the places in which the Psalmist says of idols “they have mouths, but they speak not” (115:5, 135:16), and when he adds “they must needs be borne, because they cannot go” this brings to mind the verse that says “feet have they, but they walk not” (115:7).   There would have been no need to point anything in this verse out if the decoration of trees for festive purposes were the custom being condemned here.   If that is what the prophet had in mind, those to whom he was addressing the prophecy could have legitimately come back with “Well duh, what’s your point?”    Jeremiah is speaking of images that the heathen make and worship instead of the True and Living God.      In this case they are carved from wood and plated with gold and silver.   The folly of placing faith in the works of men’s own hands, that cannot use the anthropomorphic features they are given by their crafters, and which cannot save their worshippers as the True and Living God can, is the point of all of this.

 

Anyone seeking a present day equivalent of what Jeremiah was speaking about in the tenth chapter of his book of prophecy may find one in the practice of the many who put their faith in their savings accounts, government social programs, or modern technology for their safety, security, and the solution to their problems.   This is far closer to what Jeremiah was condemning  than the practice of decorating trees to celebrate Christmas.   Idolatry is giving to that which is created, especially the work of man’s own hands, that which belongs only to the Creator.   Decorating a Christmas tree may superficially resemble what Jeremiah was talking about in the third and fourth verses of his tenth chapter if the context is ignored but the resemblance is only superficial.  

 

The hyper-Protestants who think that Christmas trees are condemned by Jeremiah are being incredibly silly indeed.   They have allowed their hatred of the pre-Reformation Christian tradition, the pre-Reformation Church, and anything they associate with these, such as the celebration of Christ’s birth, to blind them to the obvious meaning of passages like Jeremiah 10:3-4 so that they can twist these verses into condemnations of entirely innocent things like Christmas trees that are part of a holy festival that brings joy to people’s hearts.

 

H. L. Mencken once said that Puritanism “is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy”.   We are in the third week of Advent, which began with the Sunday that is customarily called Gaudete Sunday.    Gaudete is the plural imperative of a Latin verb that means “to rejoice” and thus is a command to rejoice.    The commandment to “rejoice” is repeated over and over again throughout the Scriptures.   Deut. 32:43; 1 Chr. 16:10, 31; Psalm 2:11, 5:11, 32:12, 33:1; Rom. 12:15, 15:10; Phil. 2:18, 4:4 are but a few examples.   The last mentioned of these, quoted as the epigraph of this essay, is the traditional Introit for the third Sunday of Advent, which is the origin of its name.   God is the Author of joy.  It would be unseasonably uncharitable to speculate as to where Puritanism – the original name for hyper-Protestantism in the English-speaking world- gets the aversion to human joy, happiness, and merry-making that is prominently on display in its condemnation of everything associated with these things in Christian festivals and traditions as “pagan”, but this, at least, is clear - it does not come from God.